July 21, 2015 Next time you're talking trash, or about sensitive business, double-check your cell phone — because if you've accidentally butt-dialed someone, it's perfectly legal for them to record everything you say.

A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that accidental phone calls aren't private. You might not have intended for the recipient of the call to hear what you were saying, but you still called them, and that means they're entitled to listen as long as they want — and even to record what they hear, the court said.

A pocket- or butt-dial is comparable to leaving your blinds open, a three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals court said — it's not an invasion of your privacy for someone to look in the open window.

BroadbandBreakfast's insight:

Watch what you say... this has been a problem ever since the demise of "clamshell" cell phones a decade ago....

Ideas with Fiber By providing global connectivity at the speed of light, Gigabit Internet will enable unprecedented opportunities along The Delmar Loop. As we explore the potential for creativity, education, and innovation using this high-speed internet access, we want to hear your ideas!

How would you use internet at the speed of light? Do you dream of sharing a global classroom with children in China or Spain? Want to simulcast rock concerts? What about a massive multiplayer game to build a virtual village?

HYANNIS, MA – May 20, 2015 – Increasing access to broadband connectivity is a key driver to enhancing economic development through job creation and increased revenues for cities and towns in southeastern Massachusetts and Cape Cod, the Chair of OpenCape’s Board of Directors recently told attendees of this year’s SmarterCape Summit.

Art Gaylord, Chair of OpenCape’s Board, shared insight into the non-profit organization’s progress and next phase of growth before a crowd of more than 200 business and government leaders at the SmarterCape Summit which was held on May 6 in Hyannis. As part of its next phase of development, OpenCape will be aggressively pursuing new private and public capital investments to facilitate the network’s build-out, and more rapidly meet demands for access to the network.

BroadbandBreakfast's insight:

Open Cape continues to drive the open broadband model for New England.

Increase federal funding for science and engineering research by $30 billion a year. Expand the R&D tax credit so it is more competitive with other countries, and tax income from innovation at a lower rate. Establish a National Innovation Foundation akin to the National Science Foundation (NSF). Increase federal support for STEM education while rewarding universities for graduating more STEM students. Create a national system of “manufacturing universities.” Expand H-1B visas, green cards, and citizenship for foreign-born scientists and engineers. Charge every federal agency with crafting and implementing an innovation strategy. Pass the Startup Act to promote entrepreneurship. Create a White House Office of Innovation Review. Ensure laws and regulations enable disruption rather than protect the status quo. Create an interagency taskforce to combat corporate short-termism. Revise the 1996 Telecommunications Act to enable broadband innovation. Establish a “flexicurity”system to help workers acquire skills for new jobs. 2. Boost productivity.

Bring back the investment tax credit for new machinery and equipment and worker training. Accelerate IT adoption throughout the public and private sectors. Raise the minimum wage to $10, and index it to per-capita GDP growth. Close the digital divide by helping people pay for computers and broadband. Expand funding for surface transportation by at least $30 billion per year. 3. Compete globally.

Lower the corporate tax rate to no more than 25 percent, and adopt a territorial system. Strengthen the innovative capacity of U.S. firms that do business internationally, in part by expanding financing for scaling innovations. Put trade enforcement at the center of U.S. foreign policy, and increase resources for it. Confront China by raising the cost of unfairly distorting trade investments. Create a National Industrial Intelligence Council to assess competitive challenges. Restructure the World Trade Organization (WTO) to be more effective in fighting mercantilism. Fight currency manipulation.

BroadbandBreakfast's insight:

Three key points from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation for presidential candidates.

WASHINGTON — So much of politics here in the nation's capital is about moving money from someone's pocket to someone else's. As a result, the threat of generational or sectional warfare frequently lurks below the surface of budget debates.

That's why it’s refreshing when think tanks and politicians disseminate ideas that can expand — rather than redistribute — the nation's economic pie. They do this by enabling policies that unlock value-creation.

Take federal transportation funding. The worthy idea of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation is to direct no less than 5 percent of federal highway funding to information technology-based transit projects.

BroadbandBreakfast's insight:

Important insight from Information Technology and Innovation Foundation: High-tech transportation spending can unlock new benefts.

Hopefully you know about PastPages, the tool built by L.A. Times data journalist Ben Welsh to record what some of the web’s most important news sites have on their homepage — hour by hour, every single day. Want to see what The Guardian’s homepage looked like Tuesday night? Here you go. Want to see how that Ebola patient first appeared on DallasNews.com in September? Try the small item here. It’s a valuable service, particularly for future researchers who will want to study how stories moved through new media. (For print media, we have physical archives; for digital news, work even a few years old has an alarming tendency to disappear.)

Anyway, Ben is back with a new tool called StoryTracker, “a set of open source tools for archiving and analyzing news homepages,” backed in part by the Reynolds Journalism Institute at Mizzou

BroadbandBreakfast's insight:

Proud of the incredible feats of computer-assisted reporting by Ben Welsh!

The rise of connected cars will also require new techniques to engage current millennials5 and Generation Y-ers, who are not likely to age into the same listening,6, commuting,7 or donation habits8 as previous generations. Millennials are more likely to give a little amount of money to a lot of organizations,9 though they’re not likely to give large amounts, and may be more likely to invest in a once-off Kickstarter campaign that makes them feel like part of a larger community or cohort than to become a re-occuring donor or sustaining member.10 Like their parents, however, they’re more likely to support or invest in an organization if they feel some connection to the organization, its mission, or the benefits of becoming a member.

These trends demand new ways of thinking about public radio membership and about the relationship people have with their public radio stations. The question is: What, exactly, does it mean to be a member of a public media station? What could it mean? And how could expanding the definition of what it means to be a member — and what that membership itself means — enhance and strengthen both our relationship with public media and public media itself?

BroadbandBreakfast's insight:

I'm a big believer in the concept of membership! This needs to be applied more thoroughly to the media.

The media world has changed so much that the New Republic, the Washington Post and the New York Times can never be what they once were, no matter who holds the purse strings and no matter who is in charge of editorial. But we do still need institutions that take seriously the mission of informing and debating, of reporting events and exchanging ideas – and we need them to be integrated into the way that people consume and participate in news. To get there, the marriages between owners and editors – between technologists and journalists – need to learn to operate on mutual respect. Putting technology to use for journalism needs not two distinct cultures but a new and unified one.

The Pew Research Center’s 12th annual State of the News Media report offers a fresh ranking of the most visited news sites that originated online, with Huffington Post leading the pack and BuzzFeed not far behind.

Also in the top 10 are Bleacher Report, Mashable, Slate, Vice, Gawker and Vox. For nine of the 10 sites, mobile share of traffic now outstrips desktop. The one exception was CNET.com. Among the broader group of Top 50, 39 now get more traffic to their site and related apps from mobile than desktop.

The Salt Lake Tribune is launching a new online membership service Monday as part of an effort to reshape the newspaper's Web offerings and boost its digital revenues.

Users of The Tribune's website, sltrib.com, will be offered advertisement-free access to the site along with newsletters, invitations to special events with newsmakers, and Tribune staffers and other perks — all for a fee of $9.99 a month.

The premium membership promises a cleaner, more responsive version of sltrib.com free of ads but with all The Tribune's news, sports, features and editorials.

Readers also can sign up for a sustaining membership and pay $4.99 a month for the event invitations, part of a series of newspaper-hosted gatherings dubbed "Trib Talk Live."

The Federal Communications Commission, concerned about the high cost of broadband, wants to put cell phones that can access the Internet in the hands of America’s poor in hopes of reducing the digital divide.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler is proposing to beef up the $1.7 billion Lifeline program, funded by charges on phone bills, and originally created to subsidize the cost of landline phones. The program now reaches 12 million families and has been expanded to limited-use cellphones.

BroadbandBreakfast's insight:

Count the fingers: How many Universal Service Fund programs are there?

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), also known as the Mormon Church, is releasing online more than 1.5 million records pertaining to about 4 million former slaves, and it needs volunteers to help index the huge trove of genealogical information.

In partnership with the National Archives, which stores these records, and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Mormon Church is launching the Freedmen Bureau Project at DiscoverFreedmen.org, a new website that makes these documents available free to anyone who searches for them.

The goal is to help present-day African Americans go back to their roots, without the seeming brick wall that hits them when they go as far back as 1870 — when slaves were shown on paper simply as tics or hash marks. The LDS Church believes scanning and uploading these handwritten documents online will give the descendants of former slaves a chance to connect with their ancestors from the Civil War era.

BroadbandBreakfast's insight:

Big announcement showing how important #broadband is as the new essential tool of family history.

““Innovation” is among the most highly prized civic and commercial virtues today. So much so that opposing sides in policy contests each claim its mantle.

Nowhere is this truer than in now-bubbling debate on Capitol Hill in Washington over patent reform. This isn’t a battle of David against Goliath. It’s a battle of Goliath against Goliath.

BroadbandBreakfast's insight:

Patent reform seems to be a perennial issue before Congress. But to those who are closely observing, there are signs of strength, and the possibility that this will be the year for sweeping legistative change over patents.

It took six years for the upstart firm, then known as Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti, to grow into one of the top earners on K Street, but it’s now consistently among those bringing in the most revenue.

The firm has a dozen lobbyists who work on blue-chip clients including Proctor & Gamble, Wal-Mart, Yahoo, United Technologies, the Business Roundtable, Edison Electric Institute, the National Restaurant Association, United Technologies, and the Technology CEO Council, where Mehlman serves as executive director.

Hewlett-Packard became one of the firm’s first clients in January 2005, and Maria Cino, HP’s vice president for Americas and U.S. government relations, called the lobby shop the company’s “anchor firm.”

BroadbandBreakfast's insight:

Nice profile of Bruce Mehlman's shop, and how a tech-centered practice makes sense.

On May 5th, Christopher participated in a panel conversation presented by the City of New Haven and the Connecticut Office of Consumer Counsel. Video of the event, Moving Towards A Gigabit State: Planning & Financing Municipal Ultra-High-Speed Internet Fiber Networks Through Public-Private Partnerships, is now available.

You can watch it from the Connecticut Network website. The final panel has, in order of appearance, Bill Vallee, Joanne Hovis, Christopher, Monica Webb, and Jim Baller. It begins around 3:18 and Christopher begins his presentation at 3:36. The entire video is approximately 4 hours, 30 minutes.

The event included a number of experts from the industry. From the event announcement:

A conversation on the “Nuts and Bolts” of Internet Fiber Networks targeting municipal officials and other public officials to provide information for municipalities interested in creating ultra-high-speed networks. The networks would be created via public-private partnerships through Connecticut to enable innovations in areas such as health care, education, business development and jobs creation, and public safety.

Editor’s note: There are few more compelling digital journalism stories than the growth of Quartz, Atlantic Media’s business site. Though it was born with the advantage of a highly desirable target audience — the global business elite — it has still managed to do so much right: sharable content, visual distinction, global reach, smart advertising strategy, mobile-first design…all while maintaining high quality. It’s one of the few operations I recommend to the many people who ask me: Who’s doing it right?

Below is a memo Quartz executive editor and vice president of product Zach Seward sent to the site’s staff earlier this month after a staff-wide meeting. It breaks a little news about Quartz’ future strategy; the HTML-devoted site is planning a native iOS app, and there are new efforts coming in video and podcasting. But beyond that, I think Zach’s vision of news-organization-as-API — a central content store that feeds multiple products, multiple instantiations of a core brand — is compelling enough to share with our readers.

If you want to talk about profits at the U.S.’s top newspaper companies, you don’t need big numbers any more.

Tribune Publishing could count a bare $2.5 million in net income for the first three months of the year. That’s the combined net of eight metro papers, including the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Hartford Courant, and four other good-sized dailies. It’s not that these papers’ performance a year ago was that great; it made just $11.7 million in the first quarter of 2014. But a year-over-year drop of 75 percent in net is something you notice.

05/19/2015 Download this Press Release (PDF 133 KB) NEW YORK, May 19, 2015 – The New York Times Magazine has announced its first live event in a new series that will showcase programming and conversations inspired by the pages of the magazine’s annual special issues.

New York Times Magazine editor in chief Jake Silverstein will host the NYT Mag Live event on June 7 at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. The magazine’s Design and Technology special issue, scheduled to publish the same day, will serve as the event’s framework.

Times editors and journalists will join global entrepreneurs on stage to discuss how Silicon Valley innovation is changing design around the world.

Joining Mr. Silverstein as speakers are:

Wences Casares, founder and CEO, Xapo Charles Duhigg, senior editor, NYT Live Jalak Jobanputra, founding partner, FuturePerfect Ventures Mike Krieger, co-founder, Instagram Farhad Manjoo, “State of the Art” New York Times columnist Nathaniel Popper, New York Times business reporter Stefan Thomas, CTO, Ripple Jenna Wortham, New York Times Magazine technology writer Plus a special panel of international entrepreneurs who will discuss how to succeed in overseas markets

Radio systems, such as mobile phones and wireless internet connections, have become an integral part of modern life. However, today's devices use twice as much of the radio spectrum as is necessary. New technology is being developed that could fundamentally change radio design and could increase data rates and network capacity, reduce power consumption, create cheaper devices and enable global roaming.

A pioneering team of researchers from the University of Bristol's Communication Systems and Networks research group, have developed a new technique that can estimate and cancel out the interference from one's own transmission, allowing a radio device to transmit and receive on the same channel at the same time. This therefore requires only one channel for two-way communication, using half as much spectrum compared to the current technology.

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